This invention relates, in general, to the illumination of objects, and particularly to multi-directional illumination of objects for multi-directional visual inspection thereof.
A problem in the manufacture of many articles or "objects", particularly small objects, is the need to visually inspect each object from many different directions. A known practice is to view small objects through a microscope with the viewer manipulating the object within the microscope field of view for multi-directional viewing of the object. Microscope viewing, however, tends to be tiring, and a preferred approach is to view small objects with an imaging device, e.g., a TV camera, and to inspect electronically recreated, and preferably magnified, images of the objects. The need remains, however, for multi-directional viewing for a complete visual inspection. Such multi-directional viewing can be achieved by rotating (preferably automatically) each object within the field of view of the camera or by viewing the object from various directions using multiple cameras or one or more movable cameras. With any such approach, the known inspection systems tend to be complex, slow in operation and expensive.